Buondì.
For the last few months I’ve been working with a writer, who is also one of our Italian teachers.
We have a number of websites, aimed at both English speakers (like this one) and Italian speakers, for example NonParloSpagnolo.com, which as the name suggests is for Italians who’d like to begin learning Spanish, Imparareinglese.com (figure that one out for yourselves), and italianoxstranieri.com, for teachers of Italian as a foreign language. There are probably around twenty-five websites in total, too many for me to maintain on my own, which is why I need a writer to help me.
“But what shall I write?” is her implicit and sometimes explicit question, to which I suggest she ask herself who the site is for and what those people might need or want to read about. To me, that seems fairly obvious, but then I’ve been creating websites and commissioning or writing ‘content’ for them for many years now, getting on for two decades, in fact.
If you didn’t already know, you can find out how long a website has been going and who’s behind it by searching for ‘whois’ and the domain address. For example, I Googled ‘whois onlineitalianclub.com’ and the first result reminds me that I registered this domain in 2012, so nearly nine years ago. I remember putting the website together, and writing the first articles, that summer, during the quieter moments of our summer holiday. My youngest child was nine, so finally there were quiet moments.
How did I know what to write about? Well, we had a growing Italian language school at the time, so the basic idea was to take the ‘content’ from the school site that wasn’t specifically related to choosing an Italian course in Italy, the various exercises our teachers had written, and so on, and to put it someplace where anyone could use it, where it wouldn’t be seen as promotional material for just one particular school but as a resource that was available to everyone, no matter where or how they chose to study.
And after that? After that, I just guessed. I tried things, and I asked people who used the site. People wrote me emails to say what they liked and didn’t, and sent suggestions. Over the years, a lot of club members contributed in various ways – by pointing out mistakes, for example.
But mostly, I just guessed. A lot of things we’ve done successfully, such as publishing ebooks or organising online lessons, came about because we had people hanging about looking for something useful to do. A team of interns put together our Italian Workout series, having sat through months of free Italian lessons at our school in exchange for what was supposed to be work experience. The online teaching resulted from hearing my staff moan, over and over, about how little they earned, and me replying that, given that they were only in the school five or six hours a day, why didn’t they take on a second job? But how, they’d always ask, and so…
But mostly, I just guessed. I’d ask club members, once there were a few thousand of them (there are now fourteen thousand of you), but the feedback wasn’t always very helpful – people would ask for different, contradictory things, or for content that I thought would be a distraction from the way that languages should be learned. I tried asking teachers, but that didn’t help a lot either. Putting togther winning content ideas is a very different job from teaching, as anyone in the media or on social media will tell you.
So I guessed, sometimes based on things that I spotted on people’s resumes when they came asking for work. Ah! I see you’ve really into history? Would you like to write a series of articles about Roman history for the website? Yes, sure I’ll pay you! Or, look, it’s clear you’re a big literature fan. What about summarising some classics of Italian literature, so we can encourage learners of Italian to read and listen more?
Did my guesses always work out well? Absolutely not. Certain things I spent loads of cash on were only of interest to a few. Other things worked well at the beginning but then disappeared from the search engines, so lay neglected.
As I emailed my writer yesterday: try stuff, fail quickly and cheaply, then try other stuff.
Probably the thing that worked out the best, in hindsight, was when I figured out that the best way to be producing material for leaners was to get people who were learning languages themselves to write it, so from writer-learner to reader-learner. That had to be a winning idea!
Yet there was a snag even with that brainwave. As it turned out, finding a writer or a language teacher who had the time or interest to learn foreign languages themselves was far from easy. Impossible, in fact. So eventually I abandoned the idea, though it lay there in the corner of my mind for several years, where I couldn’t help but trip over it occasionally.
And so, in the end, having run out of reasons not to, one gloomy November or December afternoon, four or five years back, I decided that if I couldn’t get anyone else to write about learning, for learners, from the learners’ point of view, I’d have a go at it myself.
I asked club members at the time (some of whom are still with us…) to pick a language from a list of alternatives: French, which I’d studied at school but forgotten; Turkish, which I’d picked up as a young man during the first years of my English-teaching career; Spanish, which is similar to Italian though more useful; and, just as a joke, Swedish – because my mother-in-law is Swedish, and my wife is Italian-Swedish bilingual.
You voted, and probably just to spite me, chose Swedish. But fine, I’m easily provoked, and with twenty-five years of language teaching behind me, had something to prove. So Swedish it was!
Back to the point of this, though. My new writer, and how she can find ideas about what to write about. Ask the readers, I tell her, try to get a conversation going! Hopefully there’ll be comments on the article, or emails in response to it, and that should give you some clues.
Here at the club we don’t get a lot of comments, as most people read these articles in an email app (to comment, you have to visit the website, locate the article, and scroll down to its end, where there is a comment form to fill out.) Often, they’ll just reply to the email containing the article, instead.
But last week’s article on Wikipedia generated loads of comments, so clearly there’s the potential!
Now the thing about commenting on the article ON THE WEBSITE is that you get to read what other people have written, not just me. And interact with their authors, too, if you wish, in the sense that you can comment on their comments and they can comment back on your comment on their comments. This assuming that anyone can be bothered to get a conversation going.
Anyway, to start the ball rolling, the title of today’s article is “Where did you begin? How far have you got? What’s next?”, which I hope will help begin a conversation amongst club members about their language learning progress and goals.
If you click here, and scroll down to the end of the article, I’m intending to write the first comment myself, about my Swedish.
If you don’t click here, you won’t see it…
Hopefully you will click, then join in by telling us about how your Italian is going.
And from what I hope will be a reasonable number of contributions, I may be able to discern ideas for future articles and content.
See?
A venerdì, allora.
P.S.
Don’t forget this week’s new ‘easy Italian reader’ ebook, an original story set in a village in northern Italy in the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties. The level is C1, meaning it’s suitable for upper-intermediate and advanced students, and for the first seven days it costs just £5.99, instead of our usual easy reader ebook price of £7.99!
Be warned, this is not a tale for readers who enjoy happy endings…
An original Italian easy reader by Francesca Colombo
Italia, circa sette anni dopo la Prima Guerra Mondiale e la successiva influenza spagnola, che insieme avevano decimato la popolazione giovane e fertile di Villalba, un piccolo paese nel nord d’Italia
Fuori dalla casa di Luigia c’era un gruppetto di persone che si guardava in attesa. Il marito di Luigia, che stava per diventare padre, mostrava tutta la sua preoccupazione.
“Voi credete che sia normale? Tante ore per…”
Il parroco sbottò, quasi fosse offeso: “Certo che è normale, abbi fede nel Signore, che diamine! Le cose ben fatte son lunghe da farsi!”
Marcello chiese scusa, rammaricato per aver messo in dubbio i piani del buon Dio. Ma in quel momento qualcuno gridò: “È nato, è nato!”
- .pdf e-book (+ audio available free online)
- .mobi (Kindle-compatible) and .epub (other ebook readers) available on request at no extra charge – just add a note to the order form or email us
- 8 chapters to read and listen to
- Comprehension questions to check your understanding
- Italian/English glossary of ‘difficult’ terms for the level
- Suitable for students at upper-intermediate level or above
- Download your Free Sample Chapter (.pdf)
How do I access my ebook?
When your order is ‘completed’ (allow up to 24 hours), a download link will be automatically emailed to you. It’s valid for 7 days and 3 download attempts so please save a copy of the .pdf ebook in a safe place. Other versions of the ebook (.mobi/Kindle-compatible, .epub) cannot be downloaded but will be emailed to people who request them.
‘Il miracolo del paese‘ just £5.99 this week!| Free sample chapter (.pdf) | Catalog
P.P.S.
Tuesday’s bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news is ready for you to read and listen to, if you haven’t already done so. I admit, I haven’t, so I can’t tell you if it’s a good one, or not. But I’ll get to it, I promise!
Daniel says
Where did you begin? How far have you got? What’s next?
Quickly then, I began Swedish as a complete beginner four or five years ago. My daughter had taken a course in Stockholm, so had left her (unfinished) course book and workbook lying about. I worked through those and also used Duolingo.
It took me around a year to realise that I wasn’t making any progress at all with the spoken side of things, at which point I started taking online lessons with a competitor (the cheapest). I tried at least four teachers and did over a hundred hours of conversation with them, but the quality of the teaching was very poor.
No matter, I was learning to communicate. At the same time, I discovered ‘easy Swedish’ websites, so began a daily regime of listening and reading to material which was being created, with Swedish government money, for what was then a vast wave of new immigrants, mostly from Syria.
At the end of the first year of speaking practice, after about eighteen-twenty months of learning, I took the Swedex A2 (second level) exam and passed with 97%! I had intended to continue with the higher levels, but the school that ran the exam in Italy quit, so it was no longer an option.
And since then I’ve been busy. I improved my Swedish listening and reading skills up to B1 or B2 with daily practice (authentic radio and news apps now), and have taken weekly conversation lessons with a club member. But I haven’t ‘studied’.
At this point it’s more ‘maintenance’ than ‘studying’, so trying not to lose the progress I made, especially as I began (for the reasons explained in today’s article) improving my French, and learning Spanish as well.
What about you??
Glynis Allen says
My Italian progress is slow. I have been in Italy for just over 2 years now and have been learning using mostly online platforms which are free and one paid which focuses mainly only on grammar, all of which are helpful. I was advised of your website from a friend and find that your emails are showing me that learning a language is very much about listening, reading regularly not just occasionally. . One of the problems is I can speak a little Italian but as soon as someone replies I freeze and my mind goes a blank, so I found that if I focus and listen, I can work out the general meaning., but am not able to just generally chat to anyone, which I miss. I have been listening to the weekly news bulletins which is helping, but need to read more. I do find that reading your emails has helped me to become more motivated and understand more about learning a new language. Thank you
Daniel says
Thanks for being the first to comment, Glynis.
I’m not trying to sell anything today, or not very hard anyway, but what you write
“One of the problems is I can speak a little Italian but as soon as someone replies I freeze and my mind goes a blank, so I found that if I focus and listen, I can work out the general meaning., but am not able to just generally chat to anyone, which I miss”
I did go through this, precisely, with my Swedish, and the solution is to do conversation lessons, assuming you can afford them. The return on investment is huge, by comparison with other ways to spend the same money. I must have spent over a thousand pounds on Swedish conversation lessons, but left that feeling of not being able to chat and interact way behind me, comparatively early in the process. It was more than worth the money, and I think you’ll find plenty of our review writers agree, for example here: https://easyreaders.org/product/online-italian-lessons30-x-30-minute-lessons/#reviews
Andrew Parsons says
Hi Glynis. Just read your story and it could have been written by me. I don’t live in Italy but visit yearly so have studied through evening classes for a few years. But like you, if I speak it and get a reply I freeze too. Hopefully we’ll get there one day 🙂
Brian Saltmarsh says
I have had a weak- week in which I’ve felt guilty about not doing italian for a week ,BUT , I realised my problem, it’s the old ” tortoise and hare ” I gave into impatience, so I have locked up the hare and will try to study better. I feel better having realised my problem.
Kathy Simpson says
I went on a skiing holiday to Italy a number of years ago only to discover that the second language in the resort was German. Asking for a dry white wine resulted in three glasses! I hate to appear like a completely ignorant Brit abroad. I had taken a phrase book with me and discovered that on the face of it Italian seemed easier than the French I had learnt at school. When I got home I signed up for a local class. I am of a similar age to you Daniel and recall chanting French verb conjugations at school. It instilled no confidence in me as I would panic if I couldn’t remember the third person plural etc. That’s a very hard habit to free yourself from and I still find I’m a bit like that now. I have done face-to-face classroom courses, intensive weekend courses, online correspondence courses and now, since retiring last October, Zoom classes.
My Italian has improved considerably since retiring as I have two Zoom classes a week with two different Italian teachers. I get to speak Italian in real conversations twice a week. While on paper my grammar knowledge is probably at a B2/C1 level I’m still all over the place when speaking, but I get to try and I can get my meaning across. One of my classes is a group class. At first I thought I was the worst in the class, maybe I am, but over time you realise that other people don’t necessarily know more than you, they just appear more confident. Having the confidence to try is so important. One thing I’ve always found about Italians is they are so pleased you are trying to speak their language. However, there will always be that devil on my shoulder telling me to look at the grammar book!
Robert says
My jealousy knows no bounds, to be multi-lingual must be like winning the lottery! I scratch along with sufficient French to survive when visiting friends in rural France but like a machine left out in the rain it takes a lot of getting started when the breaks between visits are long.
I started formal Italian classes around two years ago, most of which is oral with some comprehension exercises, but continue to struggle, whilst classmates seem to surge ahead. What to do? Well, one thing is that I won’t quit, I enjoy the change of company and classes via Zoom have been a wonderful diversion during lockdown. Added to that we have made some good friends in Italy, who we keep in touch with via Facebook, so the incentive to keep trying is there. As with French it always seems easier when immersed in the language of the country with no alternative – perhaps it gets absorbed through the pores?
I will probably remain the dunce of the class but I can always draw comfort from the fact that I can probably do many practical tasks that the rest wouldn’t even know how to start, I have good health and, despite the mountain that foreign languages present to me, I am never bored.
Anne Lloyd says
Hi Daniel.
I’ve started to use this site on a regular basis only quite recently. I’ve been studying Italian at an adult evening class for six years, having made several half-hearted attempts to teach myself before then. My class is now online: at the moment our course is based on the book Nuovo Magari, with plenty of (somewhat faltering) chat about books, cinema and politics.
I’m a recently retired English teacher and librarian: having taught basic Latin, and with passable French and a smattering of German, I have a very solid foundation of knowledge about how language works. My reading level in Italian is now around C1; listening and writing both B1/2; speaking trailing at a woefully poor B1. I know that’s because, like Fawlty Towers’ Manuel, I learn it from a book. So for me the next stage is probably to seek out more conversation opportunities.
The value of what your site provides for me lies in the scope offered for repetitive grammar practice, to be done in my own time and at my own pace. I wouldn’t want to be using regular class time going over and over pronominal verbs, but I can do that here, and no one is judging me except me! And I do appreciate the range of other activities.
Hope that’s of some use.
Patricia Barber says
Anne – I too am a retired English teacher and your on-line class sounds interesting. Could you share information it with me, please? I participate in a conversation group on-line, which I enjoy, but my comprehension of spoken Italian is still terrible. I posted my comments in response to Daniel’s query about where we started and where we are now a few minutes ago, if you’d like to vet my response before sharing information about your current class. Patricia Barber
Patricia Barber says
I began with Pimsleur to prepare for a month in Italy 5 years ago. The Italians are very generous with their language, especially the farther south we traveled, encouraging me to speak Italian and correcting my grossest errors with kindness. I was also using Duolingo while I was in Italy, incorporating new words into my daily attempts at conversations. When we returned home, I decided to continue studying Italian by taking adult education classes at my local community college where I eventually ended up in a weekly conversation class with a wonderful and skillful teacher who saw her role as facilitator who kept everyone speaking Italian and threw in a lesson so we had new material to add to our growing skills. I also had a small weekly group of four other people who met for morning coffee and Italian conversation one morning a week and we paid an Italian teacher to meet with us so we weren’t reinforcing bad habits and mispronounced words. In addition my city has a large friends of Italy type organization that sponsors classes, movie nights, lectures and conversation groups, along with a large library of books, audio books and films. A year ago I moved to a small town in another state that doesn’t have any Italian education opportunities mostly because of the Covid pandemic and now I have a weekly half hour with a teacher from ONLINEITALIANCLUB. The two most important things I’ve learned are how hard it is to overcome perfectionist tendencies to not speak until I can say it correctly and smoothly and how hard it is to understand what’s being said to me in Italian. In fact, after all this exposure to spoken Italian, my comprehension is still terrible and this is also my greatest frustration that I have made so little progress here.. In fact, if there’s anyone in the Fredericksburg, Virginia area who would like to form a conversation group, please let me know.
Kathryn D Temple says
I’m in Annapolis/half-time in DC and there are some local groups on MeetUp, doing mostly zoom at the moment though I think they will start meeting up face-to-face as the pandemic eases and more people get their vaccines. You might try them? I’m working more than full-time so haven’t been able to do any of them but get all sorts of interesting announcements from meet-up.
David says
Dear Daniel,
Thanks indeed for the inspirational materials with which you seed your website. I visited a bookshop 3 years ago and picked up a basic Italian primer ahead of travelling en famille to the Amalfi Coast to marry my youngest son (I’m in Christian Lay Ministry, so that’s not as weird as it sounds). His fiancé had done all the legwork, but as no one was getting on board with the language learning I thought I’d give it a go.
What a good decision, 3 years down the track I’m having a wonderful time in two Lower Intermediate classes, one still by Zoom, using other technowizzery resources, and doing one to one study with a fiercely determined Russian lady who keeps my nose firmly pressed to the grindstone. Our latest project is dissecting a podcast in which a young Italian couple interview a Dutch lady of 82 who has studied and subsequently taught Italian since the age of 39. As with your programmes, she is quite an inspiration.
Very best wishes, David
Hester says
Hi Daniel
I started teaching myself Italian nine years ago. I wanted to be able to read interviews in newspapers and to understand spoken interviews with a particular person.
I did several free courses including Duolingo (till one day they wiped out everything I’d done!!) and your website.. Now I have achieved my first objective to some degree, though not my second.. I read a lot in Italian (including Wikipedia) Following your excellent advice I now listen to a little spoken Italian every day, either your news or Radio 24 . I think I may be improving very slightly.
Also following your advice I read books in Italian. I like to read detective stories, so I buy ebooks in Italian on Amazon. I’m pretty slow, but getting better.
Thank you for everything you do and all your advice and encouragement.
Steve says
Hi Daniel. I started learning Italian about three years ago and must have made most of the possible language learning mistakes along the way. I began by studying (a mistake as I now know) grammar, believing that a proper grasp of the fundamental building blocks must be the best basis for learning the language, but failing to recognise how many and how increasingly complex those ‘basis’ became as I became more immersed in them. After abandoning that rather discouraging beginning, I began to learn from a variety of resources such as books and CD courses and language learning apps as well as watching videos on YouTube and the like. I’m currently taking weekly lessons face to face with an Italian language teacher where we focus almost exclusively on conversation. This has without doubt been the most enjoyable and productive part of my language learning thus far. I am also doing a structured course online. I think that the advice I wish I’d been given at the outset, would be to have taken advice from a variety of sources, had a structured plan and to focus on conversation. I find that within conversation all other aspects of the language make themselves apparent at the appropriate time. I’ll continue to learn Italian and hopefully continue to improve but always with the reason I first began to learn the language at the forefront of my mind, and that’s for the simple pleasure of learning another language. It is, as you say, a lifelong process, so enjoy it.
Thank you for the encouragement you give to so many, for your enthusiasm and for your ready wit and sense of humour.
Andrea Robinson says
Hi Steve. My journey was the reverse of yours ! Wanting to be cabin crew I went to work in Italy for 3 months in the late 1980s. I did a 10 hour course before I left and then picked it up as I went along. 3 years later I was still there and had an Italian boyfriend who didn’t speak any English (linguistically this was very useful !). I returned to the UK and wanted to take GCSE Italian before I forgot it all. The teacher said my grammar was not good and that I spoke like Italians do ! I took the exam after lots of grammar work and now after a gap of 30 years I’m about to take A Level Italian with the help of Daniels lovely tutors and a conversation class I do each week. Like others when I first get to Italy in a holiday it takes some time to get back in the swing of talking Italian again. My too too would be to have a go at making conversation as by making mistakes we learn. I too love Daniels emails and wit. He’s amazingly supportive.
Dave Ellis says
Hello Daniel
I love languages and almost took French and German A level while at school way back in the sixties ( I am a currently well retired science teacher). At that time I started to teach myself Italian from a book which I kept on my shelf for 45yrs as a reminder. I have been to Italy countless times climbing and now for the last 12 years or so my sister in law lives there. Consequently I started learning again with weekend classes but not making much progress until I met a friend who was having lessons by skype and I joined in. The teacher advised me of your club and I have been reading your emails ever since. I now take lessons through your club with a very amusing and understanding teacher from Genoa. I took on board your advice about just reading and not looking up anything I did not know and very quickly got the gist of what was going on. I loved reading the Pinocchio stories last summer but the other stories were a bit beyond me in the proper Italian form though I did read the ereader forms. As to my levels I am not sure but I read at about A2/B1 then less for understanding spoken Italian and even less for me speaking Italian. In my lessons I feel like the family in ‘Going on a Bear Hunt’ where they go ‘stumble trip stumble trip’ but the 30minutes vanishes in no time! So I suppose what I really want is not levels but understanding and quickness of thought to be able to sensibly reply. Many thanks for your inspiration and continued message that this is a marathon not a sprint.
Agnes says
Thanks for your encouragement and lively blogging Daniel. I like reading what you write and am grateful for your links because I’m always losing them – it has to be easy to find stuff since I’m so busy.
I’m an experienced language learner too and agree about the wide ranging listening. But I could do with follow up exercises to move from passive to active use since like others I struggle to speak.
I read Alicia Bartlett’s wonderful romanzi gialli and have started online lessons with your team. This is good although I think I could use them better…
Agnes
Mary says
Hi Daniel
I started learning Italian in an adult education evening class about 12 years ago. I was looking for a new fun activity away from the day job…although I have to admit that my day job was teaching French and Spanish.
I winged my way through through the first year. As you can imagine the methodogy was very much based on comprehension and basic grammar, which I could cope with with very little effort or time commitment. Then half way through the second year came the wake up call! I had a few days in Italy and was so frustrated at the fact that I understood the basic tourist stuff, but couldn’t find the words to reply. (I wasn’t bothered about making mistakes, foreigners are allowed to do that aren’t they?) I realised I was hooked and that it was time for me to up my game!
The first thing I did was to find myself an italian class in which there was no English spoken. I followed that up with everything else listed below which I am still doing, not for study, but for the sheer pleasure of seeing how my understanding and using of real Italian is improving.
1.. Listening to Italian pop music on “radioitalia.it” and “Rai Radio 2.
3. Watching Raiuno eg. quizes like “L’eredita”/soaps like “Il paradiso delle signore”/Films in Italian
4. Reading news articles/easy italian news
5. Holidaying in Italy and creating opportunities to practice Italian eg. courses/homestays/guided tours in Italian.
6. Taking online Italian Skype lessons.
I can now understand the majority of standard Italian spoken at “normal speed” (and am able to read real Italian novels (albeit rather slowly) and I can hold my own in a conversation.
Whats next? (Besides continuing with what I am already doing). I think I need to expand my vocabulary and use of a wider variety of phrases and structures. I think I need to move out of what has now become my comfort zone by listening to and watching different and more challenging radio and TV programmes and by making myself read more actively, attentively and rapidly. And then by pushing myself to try out less familiar language in my Skype lessons.
Jane merves says
Your reply is particularly helpful. I love that you made a list of specific activities and I am going to make note of your suggestions. I am a beginner student of Italian (since September 2020) and struggle with understanding spoken Italian. Thanks so much!
Hester says
Hi Daniel
I started teaching myself Italian nine years ago. I wanted to be able to read interviews in newspapers and to understand spoken interviews with a particular person.
I did several free courses including Duolingo (till one day they wiped out everything I’d done!!) and your website.. Now I have achieved my first objective to some degree, though not my second.. I read a lot in Italian (including Wikipedia) Following your excellent advice I now listen to a little spoken Italian every day, either your news or Radio 24 . I think I may be improving very slightly.
Also following your (surf, don’t dig) advice I read books in Italian. I like to read detective stories, so I buy ebooks in Italian on Amazon. I’m pretty slow, but getting better.
Thank you for everything you do and all your advice and encouragement.
JoAnn says
Hi Daniel
I don’t remember exactly when I started learning Italian, but I did start the traditional way by attending a class and focusing on grammar. It was the first time I attempted to learn a second language and my results were poor, After giving up for a while, I searched for different approaches to language learning and found some inspiration on YouTube. I dragged out some old books by Stephen Krashen from my teaching credential program and rediscovered the concepts of language acquisition, comprehensible input, lowering the affective filter, etc. From then on I focused on input via reading (children’s books, at first) and listening to YouTube, podcasts, etc. I totally ditched the grammar. My ability to understand the language increased tremendously. Speaking is still my weakest skill and I need to restart conversation practice lessons,
Thank you for your work and entertaining emails.
Mary Austin says
I have studied Italian on and off for years. My husband’s relatives live in Northern Italy and do not speak English. I learned enough to make our trips more enjoyable but really lacked discipline. The last three years I have worked much harder. I confess that I love grammar which is both good and bad. My reading is very good. Thx to you and your website I am reading and listening to Italian daily. I definitely see improvement. I take a conversation class. Speaking is of course my weakest ability, however when we go to Italy I do far better than in a class. Thank you for all your advice, resources and easy readers.
Cynthia Kuiper says
Dear Daniel,
Since you asked, my notion to flirt with learning Italian came from my passion for opera, especially Italian opera, because before the days of sottotitoli I never had a clue about what was being said (sung). But what finally prompted me into action was a Ted talk by one of the inventors of Duolingo. That promised to be fun, so I thought, what’s to lose? I gave it a go and did indeed find it intriguing and enjoyable. And it was really cool to also be able to practice during downtimes like when waiting for an appointment, for a journey to end, or something to begin etc.
I was fully aware that this was not a very efficient way to make actual progress but didn’t want to take the fun out of the process (which I knew would kill my enthusiasm stone dead). Now after some six years of Duolingoing in spare moments I can cope with most of what it has to offer – although I’m a bit ratty on some of the grammar because I’ve never gone to actual lessons anywhere. Mostly I can now cope with simple written Italian but scariest thing is my total inability to ‘on the spot’ put what I want to say in Italian – that’s a painful and rarely rewarding exercise.
Some years ago, through a shared interest, I had been fortunate to make friends with a visiting Italian tourist and after we had visited each other several times I had quietly started on Duolingo – I didn’t tell her because I wanted to be able to surprise her on my next visit. Well, that was a naive expectation and needless to say, while I could sometimes understand some of what she was saying (when slow and short enough) I realised I would need miles more Italian under my belt before I could spring any such surprise.
I was still enjoying the learning itself but realised that to actually get anywhere something needed to change. About that time I stumbled on your website and signed up to easyitaliannews. That was a very rude shock at first but, combined with your thoughtful and encouraging communications, I persisted and now I listen to and read those religiously. As you said it would, it’s undoubtedly getting easier. I enjoy bushwalking and will listen to a broadcast over and over again as I walk – and each time another penny drops – a micro step, yes – but one of the million I will need and a small but smug satisfaction. The streamed Italian news broadcasts however (once I finally got the technology working) were an even ruder shock – who knew people could speak so fast?? Holy cow! – was this rubbing in the point that I was on a ticket to nowhere?
So there was still a gaping hole in this process! Slowly but surely I am coming to the realisation that I must get more serious, grapple my fears of making a complete ass of myself and sign up for online conversation lessons. Bring on the next sale!
(Id also love to come to your school and take lessons, but Covid put paid to that idea and here in Australia it seems like international travel will be untenable for a good while yet.)
Most of all, thank you for your encouragement and musings.
Tutto il meglio per te
Cynthia
Karen Graham says
Hello Daniel,
I started learning about 15 years ago in preparation for a couple of holidays travelling around Italy by train. I used the BBC tapes and book ‘Get by in Italian’ and I learnt enough to order food and to recognise which platform a train would be leaving from and whether it was late. My partner and I then attended night-school classes for several years and took the GCSE exam (A*). We then bought a house in Italy and have spent between 4 and 6 months here every here. We expected the language to just come BUT instead our Italian language skills have floundered! As you said in an email earlier this year the opportunities for speaking Italian in daily life can be limited, and that is especially true here as we live in a very rural area. Before the pandemic I used to buy a newspaper or read the one in the cafe and we would visit our neighbours regularly. However, even for our farming neighbours, Italian is a second language. They were born and bought up with the local dialect which is quite different from received Italian. Our conversations revolve around the same topics every time i.e. the weather and the current farming activities so our vocabulary does not expand. Recently your website was recommended by another English lady here so now we are working our way through the listening exercises and have just finished our first ebook from your store.
Many thanks,
Chris Jolley says
Dear Daniel, after our honeymoon at Lago di Como years ago, my wife decided to learn Italian to make it less stressful on our next trip to la bella Italia, she later tricked me into starting a beginners course at our local library despite my protestations of being in my sixties, being English and rubbish at languages and not remembering why I walked upstairs. 6 years in now, I’m still doing the class but I have added various attachments… of listening to loads of modern italian music, finding your website and listening to/reading EasyItalianNews 3 times a week, got myself a VPN and like a lady in an earlier comment, I watch programmes like L’Eredita and documentaries and films. Oh, and I have completed Duolingo but now realise that, although it is helpful, it has its limitations. Recently due to your advice I found a local Italian lady who does speaking/conversation lessons (online at the moment) and my progress and speaking confidence has rocketed, I now gazzump your excellent son and read EIN out loud to myself first, scarily recording it, then check his (obv better) pronunciation afterwards. I always read your blogs and love them and your advice. Many thanks, you and your great website have really helped me.
Annie Carment says
My husband was born was born in a refugee camp in Trieste (following the eviction of the Italian speakers from Istria) He came to Australia when he was two years old but his traumatised parents cut off contact with their families in Italy and Istria.
Seven years ago he was discovered on Facebook by his long lost Italian family (at least 80 of them) after which our family (at least 8 of us) travelled to Italy to meet them. And some of us have visited every year since, until “il virus”. It’s a long and expensive pilgrimage from Australia, but we are making up for sixty years of lost time.
Before our first trip I tried to learn what I could – mostly via audiobooks, podcasts, and anything else that I could listen to while driving, gardening, doing housework, or taking care of the nipoti. My husband grew up speaking only Italian (with very limited vocabulary) at home but only English everywhere else. He has a difficult relationship with the language and had never spoken Italian with me or our children. No such emotional history for me – I fell in love with the language and the learning of it.
I have been eclectic in my use of resources and my methodologies. For the past few years I have enjoyed fortnightly skype lessons with a fabulous teacher, who I have met on a few of my visits to Italy.
Two things that I have learned about learning:
1) I will never be finished. I will never be “good enough”. That’s the frustrating and the beautiful thing about learning a language. It is a never-ending process with always more to learn and discover.
2) I started learning at age 62. At the same time my children and grandchildren have been learning, after a fashion. From the start they had a capacity that I didn’t for absorbing the language osmotically. I needed to start with grammar. I needed to know the rules, even though I realise every rule has exceptions. I gained satisfaction from writing the rules by hand in notebooks (and I still do.) For me, grammar is like a big tree and I need to know where the branches are. I believe that this is probably true for most older learners, and the older you are the truer is gets.
My spoken Italian hits a steep learning curve when we are there with the cousins in Veneto and Marche and Napoli and Istria. Even when they are speaking Italian rather than dialect, the regional differences are striking and my head spins. By the time this pandemic has done with us and I can return to Italy I expect that my spoken language will be very arrugginata. But hey, that will be another challenge!
Linda says
I learnt a serviceable amount of Italian many decades ago. Then it got elbowed aside by other commitments/pursuits/languages/aspirations… It was your website that encouraged me to get back in the water. Thanks HUGELY for the materials, and for your weekly pep talks!
Claire M says
I loved the sound of Italian, holidays in Italy , the food & operas so did a short Italian course some 15 years ago. Since then we’ve had various trips to Italy – I find that grammar tends to go out of the window when I get into a conversation, & certainly at first I often found French , which I had learned many decades ago ,would insert itself. However one has to plough on & keep using it – we have a U3A Italian conversation group (virtual at present of course) & I have zoom Italian conversations with friends & family , & gradually it improves. I also find listening to easyitalian news regularly really helpful & understand virtually all of it now. – very grateful for these resources.
Jane says
I started learning Italian with Michel Thomas’ audio course which I borrowed from the library. At first that seemed very strange as there was no grammar book to look at! I then started on Duolingo and went to an Italian class. I am now in a U3A Italian conversation group. There are five of us in the group and we are meeting twice a week on zoom at the moment. I really ought to book some online sessions with one of Daniel’s teachers as I still find it very difficult to put thoughts into words.
The novelist Jhumpa Lahiri has written a really interesting book about her quest to become fluent in Italian. She ended up moving with her family to Rome to be fully immersed in the language. It’s well worth a read and is written in a dual language format.
Thank you for all your encouragement, Daniel.
Pete Turtle says
Hi Daniel,
I think my experience is similar to your own in terms of learning Italian. For various reasons, none of them to learn a language, I upped roots and moved to a small village in the heart of Abruzzo just over 10 years ago. My italian at that time amounted to “Ciao” and nothing more, and none of the locals spoke English.
I have never taken any language lessons, if you discount the stilted school German that I endured over 40 years ago, and never really thought myself a “language” person – I’m a scientist and engineer by training and vocation and thought my brain was tuned more to numbers than words.
However, after visiting the local bar every evening for some months armed with nothing more than a pocket English – Italian dictionary I started being able to communicate with the locals in Italian. Every evening I scanned the local newspaper, trying to make sense of the stories from a combination of looking at the photos, picking up on words that are similar to the English equivalents and “filling in the gaps” with pure guesswork. I watched Italian TV – there is no English TV there so I didn’t have a choice either way..
10 years down the road, and now with an Italian wife, I consider myself to have reached at least C1 level, I have no fear of conversing in Italian any more, and all this without so much as looking at a grammar book. Sure, there is still a lot to learn, and there always will be. I have provided many laughs to my Italian friends (and relations) through my sometimes ridiculous use of the language in the past, but now everything is hunky dory, I couldn’t be happier.
I can even watch the TV now and tell, sometimes, where an Italian comes from based on their speech.
Full credit to Daniel for continuously pushing the reading / listening / speaking message, it has worked well for me and hasn’t been a particularly arduous task once the difficult first few months were swept under the carpet.
Paul Hearn says
From the very start I had set my Goal, That is to learn enough Italian to just be able to sit down at a table and have a conversation with locals and talk about everyday things that happen in daily life. No more!
I learn words that I commonly use every day. …..I DON’T need to talk about, how to become a rocket scientist…..
I only go so far, then stop….time for consolidation, once I am happy with what I have Learned, only then move on, It may only be a short single phrase or a couple of words.
I was not a great fan of your ideology ( just listen to conversations with out looking up every word i didn’t Know ) But for the hell of it! I gave it a try. After a week of this, I found that Italian speech had slowed as I began to comprehend more words.
I did not study or listen intensively, but only in a passive mode, with an Italian news broadcast playing in the background as i was driving.
Many thanks for the inspiration you and your team provide through your site.
John says
Hi Daniel
Some years ago we (my wife and I) planned a trip to join friends in Trentino, which would involve a train ride from Verona, so I spent much of the Summer playing Teach Yourself tapes on my Walkman as I did the gardening. I was delighted to find that I could buy the tickets, find the right train, and reach the right destination without much trouble. It was, however, rather disappointing that most of the locals would only speak German! After the trip, I signed in for an evening course in Italian, then another, and eventually doing an “A” level. We’ve been back to Italy many times since then, often with Italian and French friends, and I’m now comfortable with one-to-one conversations, though I sometimes lose track trying to follow talks aimed at a largely Italian audience, and I can read books and magazines in my own subject areas. I find spoken Italian so much easier than French, which I’ve been trying to learn since my school days, and still have great difficulty following; but I won’t give up!
Kathryn Temple says
My journey is a little different…my university sent me to Italy for a semester to teach our American students in a study abroad program. I really didn’t think about learning Italian as my interest was in learning Spanish since so much Spanish is spoken in the U.S. But like so many I fell in love with Italy (I was in Fiesole outside of Florence), started working with a tutor online a couple of times a week, did some duolingo, etc. I did not learn much while in Italy as I was working and enjoying traveling in my free time. Flash forward two years. later…it turns out that as a “senior” I can audit courses at my university for about $150 for an intensive course that meets five times a week. In an ordinary year, I couldn’t manage it as just getting to class would interfere too much with my work as a university professor BUT COVID! Everything went online, I no longer had a long commute, and it has worked out beautifully. I am now taking the fourth course and have pretty much had at least an intro to intensive advanced grammar. And I’ve continued with my very patient online Italian tutor twice a week. Am I comfortable speaking? No. Can I read without a dictionary? No. Can I understand fast-spoken Italian? Also, no. But I can almost make out the Italian news if I listen and read at the same time, and I’m looking forward to a month or more at Daniel’s school so I can do nothing but Italian when Covid lifts. In the meantime, I keep stumbling along while the undergrads in my classes forge ahead…of course, I’m working more than 50 hours a week and not being graded…and I’m old. I would say at this point I can make myself understood in basic Italian which is about a million steps ahead of where I was a year ago. Overall, I’d say that I agree with Daniel: speaking and listening is more important than learning grammar. And unfortunately, at least at my University, grammar seems to be emphasized. This could be partly a function of Covid in that zoom classes do not really facilitate open conversation or just a hangover from past methods of instruction. One great thing about taking classes with smart undergrads: it’s humbling!